A promise

Meow boy has been asking me to write something for quite some time now. I initially blamed the writer's block due to stress and academics and the like but as time passed I have realised that it goes a little beyond that. I have never been so pressurised as to ever stop writing. I have always loved the whole ritual of writing right from the silly detective stories I wrote as a child to amuse myself to my modest beginnings at a novel which was entirely lost due to a faulty hard drive.
When I look back, I now realise that my writing reduced the more I read. As a child I had no inhibitions and could sit and write for hours without realising it. I wrote as much as I could from Dear Diary entries to poetry which I struggled hard to rhyme to obituaries for dead pets. I was always looking at a different angle to write a story from. Becoming my writer was what I wanted for the longest time. My reading which, I believed, would add value and flavour to my writing however worked in a very different way.
The more I fell in love with the writing styles of other authors the more critical I became of my own writing. I wrote and rewrote because the lines had to be just perfect and over the years, I seem to have given up on it altogether.
This blog post is not merely a forum to crib and analyse why I stopped writing but a promise to be a little kinder on my own words and ideas in the future.
Here's to more baby steps that go beyond a nostalgic blog post!

Once upon a summer..

There is a certain allure to being a tourist in Europe. To having a checklist of must-see places and getting a grin of satisfaction on your face as you tick them off.Today I was a whole new different kind of tourist in Europe. The spontaneous one.All we knew in the morning was that we had to go see the Rhine falls. We surprisingly left on time and managed to land up in Schauffausen. We had no clue which direction to head in and managed to reach a place with 500 different sign boards all saying Rhine falls. We decided to walk in one particular direction we felt fondly towards and walked up a slightly inclined road. We could hear it first. Then we took a turn and saw the falls in all its glory. Out came our cameras and our tourist-ness. We photographed anything and everything that looked remotely pretty.We ate a typical European lunch (quick and not satisfying) at a picturesque restaurant overlooking the falls. We then took a boat ride which led us straight to a steep flight of stairs which gave us the most spectacular and breathtaking views of the falls. Then we got ourselves a bottle of coke and two glasses and headed to spot in a park under the shade of a tree. We sat and drank our cokes in states of complete contentment looking at the river flowing and the mountains in the background.We found our way to the station and decided that we had enough time to stop at Zurich for a while. Both of us had not even a remote clue of what to see or where to go. We took the safe way out. We asked for the closest water body and headed straight to Bellevue. My first point on the agenda was to get some ice cream in that heat. With ice cream cones in hand we walked along the bridge enjoying the view and people watching more than anything else. We found a small colourful fair and I insisted that we had to take a giant wheel ride. As the wheel moved higher and higher, the city just got prettier and prettier. All the colours of the boats, the people on the shores, the tulips, the solid, old churches were too much to take all at once.
A little stroll across the shore. An impromptu concert. A Jim Morrison sound alike. Pictures with a painted golden man. A cold can of beer. Window shopping. And we had somehow reached the station again.
We noticed a little park tucked away just before the station and entered it almost on impulse. One of us chose to tuck her jacket around her and lie down on the grass and look at the blue sky while the other chose to take his camera and take pictures of everything around us.
We both go back home with memories of a different kind of Europe. It wasn't special only because of the places we saw, it was the sheer joy of discovering bits and pieces that we didn't know existed.

The top 10 invaluable life lessons I learnt as a child

• Be a little more caring and loving towards your grandmother lest one day a wolf impersonates her and you don’t even notice.
• If you think you are likely to get lost, put more reliable markers along the way apart from food in a forest full of hungry birds.
• When you plan on breaking into a bear’s house, be a little careful with the evidence. Half eaten bowls of porridge, broken furniture and sleeping on their beds after a heavy meal is a strict no-no.
• If your head is an egg then it is highly suggested that you do not sit on precarious walls.
• When you have seven dwarfs as friends, it is advisable to keep one or two at home as body guards, especially when you have evil step mothers with poisoned apples lurking about.
• When your fairy godmother appears in front of you, ask to marry the prince himself rather than asking for shiny shoes and a carriage and then wait for the prince to find your feet.
• Never, ever, put a baby in a cradle on a tree top.
• If you have been cursed and find yourself trapped in a castle, either grow your hair long enough or sleep till your Prince charming comes along.
• A pea under ten mattresses can be very uncomfortable to sleep on.
• No matter how regal an emperor you are, be smart enough to realise the difference between wearing good clothes and no clothes at all.

Alphabet Soup!

Always. Silence. Comfortable.
Remembrance. Affection. Evident.
Closure. Romance. Undercurrent.
Hearty. Avaricious. Time.
Immense. New. Dreams.
Tender. Abduction. Thoughts.
Her. Tangle. Emotions.
Always. Half. Better.

First words together...

Muse: Finani

10 easy steps to completing an assignment in corporate finance

Step 1:
Receive mail about assignment. Look around for more people to crib to about the incessant workload. Mark it as starred and promise yourself to look at it soon.

Step 2:
Morning of the day before the assignment is due, talk to people and nod along when they say 'It is going to be a long night today. It is quite difficult'. Promise to start by afternoon itself so you can sleep early in the night.

Step 3:
Wake up from your long afternoon nap and tell yourself that you needed the sleep to be alert and work on the assignment all night.Get yourself some snacks. Afterall, you need the energy to work all night. Chat for a while over coffee.

Step 4:
Read the assignment once and exclaim loudly to no one in particular that the analysis needs to be done for your peer company too. Feel free to add expletives of your choice to this step.

Step 5:
Read class notes furiously and try to see if any familiar words correspond between yours and his.
Try to interpret your sleepy handwriting to figure out what exactly you meant when you wrote those words.

Step 6:
Officially give up on figuring out the assignment on your own and start pinging everyone on your gtalk furiously to figure out if they have figured out what to do. Ideally in this step, there will always be a few souls who have figured it out and will tell you what to do.

Step 7:
Start the assignment with all intentions of doing it properly and pore over annual reports hoping that the necessary question is irrelevant to your company

Step 8:
When sick of Step 7 [hint: words will start blurring in front of you and Microsoft word will be a distant white haze], start writing random answers and somehow aim to complete the assignment.

Step 9:
Send shoddily done assignment and hope your roll number is not picked by the random number generator. As you go to sleep, Promise to start early next time and do full justice to the assignment.

Step 10:
Next assignment arrives in your mailbox. Repeat Steps 1 through 9.

Anything but blue on a saturday night

The best part of any week is a Saturday night. You have the whole emptiness of Saturday to look back on and the whole emptiness of Sunday to look forward to. Ever since I came to XL, weekends have lost the significance they used to have in my life. It is merely days which pass here with no clear distinction between the days of the week.
Saturdays in Bangalore used to go along the predictable lines- wake up late, eat a heavy lunch while watching mindless television, read a nice book while lying down and fall asleep with the book on my face, wake up to have tea and then finally venture out for some unplanned shopping or a drive followed by dinner at one of our usual places. The night inevitably used to end with us having Kulfi at Bowring and a maghai paan while we lazily drove back home discussing whether our Sunday morning breakfast plans would culminate at Koshys or Adigas.
They say change is the only constant and change did come to our saturday night routine at XL. :)
It was the alumni homecoming week so the atmosphere in college was a lot lighter than usual. The college was decked up and we had a cultural program and a bodhi tree performance to look forward to that evening. I had gone to Brindha athai's house to spend the evening there and came back to college around 10 very well-fed and content.
We stormed up to the empty common room while the whole batch was listening to Bodhi Tree and got the whole TT table to ourselves where we let Pandey fool us into thinking that he was a loser when it came to Table Tennis. Very soon, we discovered that he was just about smashing everything in our face and that Priya could play table tennis on a 'whole new level' :P
As Bodhi Tree wrapped up, we decided that change of game was 'on the cards' and slowly moved to my warm room to play Uno.

"Reverse"
"Draw 4. Red"
"Damn you, Pandey!"
"Uno"
"You forgot to say Uno. Draw one now."
"Actually the rule is: you draw 5 if you forget to say Uno"
"Shut up, Dixie"

Then began a session of Taboo. After briefing Priya and Sumesha with the rules we began the game.

"Where do babies come from?"
"Eh?"
"Things that are in the aquarium"
"Fish?"
"Yeah. Those babies"
"Fish babies?"
"Yeah!!"
"Eggs?"
"Really expensive!"
"Really expensive eggs? What? I don't get it!"
"Argh!! Never mind"

"What am I?"
"Loser" "Stud" "Monitor" "Class representative"
"What am I to all the girls in class?"
"Brother?"
"Aaaa! Never mind! Give me the next card"

Through all this madness, poor Astha was curled up quietly on her bed with the headphones on watching a movie amidst all the crazy loons gesticulating wildly. Finally at 4 we decided to call it a night.

For the first time in all these months, I went to bed on a Saturday night not missing Bangalore. Difficult achievement that! :)

Happy birthday!

November 10th and 11th have always been a special part of my life. Two people who make up all my childhood memories celebrate their birthdays today and tomorrow. Many years have gone by now and we never speak as often as we should but some relationships, I have always believed, never need to be reinforced by contact. These two days in the year always sets the clock back for me as I think of all the wonderfully ridiculous things that we have done and how there was never a dull moment thanks to three overactive imaginations always at work.

As my birthday gift to the two of you, here is a trip down memory lane…

• The summer school/crèche idea that we pioneered in Sri ram avenue with business foresight rare for such a young age and our absolutely brilliant pricing strategies for the school. “No, of course, we can give you a discount” “So do we give each child two erasers or one?” I still wonder why the plan fell through. :P
• Our trips to the ‘secret’ garden with lemonade and biscuits to discuss absolutely ‘critical’ matters sitting in a dark and dingy hut worrying what was going to crawl out of where and then being absolutely heart broken when we discovered our ‘secret’ garden was the most preferred walking trail of more than half the residents of the colony and that it wasn’t so secret after all.
• Playing hide and seek and all of us running to the terrace of Kleen systems and hiding there every single time.
• Making up secret languages and driving the third person mad by pretending it was a real language with one person begging to be taught the new code.
• Strutting around the colony refusing to socialise with any kid other than each other presuming we were the ‘elite’. 
• Swimming for 2 hours in Emperor's club and then eating Chilly Gobi and Panner manchurian like world starvation was at end.
• Making prank calls to half the world and finally being sheepish when we were busted by the telephone department.
  
• Solving elaborate detective mysteries with our heads full of Famous five and Secret seven.
• Playing WWF cards with a vengeance and grinning like idiots when we saw that our next card was going to be Hulk Hogan.
• Finding cow jaw bones during our many excavation sessions and then going into a tizzy of excitement because we were certain it was a dinosaur bone, and then spending an hour under the sheets with a torchlight to add to the ‘allure’ to discover which dinosaur it was by comparing the bone to each dinosaur in our dinosaur cards pack. It is only now I can understand why our mothers reacted the way they did when they saw us with bones of dead animals on the bed.
• Playing cricket with Kalavathi Ma'am's wall as the boundary line and arguing about who should scale the wall to get the ball from the farm.
  
• Making elaborate make believe dishes and making a reluctant boy pretend to eat them all.
• Hosting grand insect cum craft exhibitions and actually charging people to see our tomfoolery.
  
• Creating a new e-mail ID each week with no one to mail but each other but the excitement never ceased. “Put a dot between my initials.” “Put Cool after my name”
• Burying each dead pet with a grand ceremony and a funeral that most undertakers would be proud of.

And they go on…

It was not that our relationships ever lacked the numerous fights and the enormous tantrums but we still had one heck of a time and a childhood that most people would envy. People often ask me if I felt lonely as a single child. I always meet them squarely in the eye and say “Lonely? I grew up with a brother and a sister.”

Anjali and Govind, Happy birthday! Wishing you both the very best in life.

Surprise!

Yes, we were aware that he said that there would be a quiz in the 6th or 7th session.
And yes, we knew that we had no classes all morning and we could've read those chapters.
And yes, we still woke up at 10 after our thumbs started hurting from pressing Snooze.
And no, we were undettered by the number of people studying around us. 'Paranoid' ,we told them, 'He said only after he completes the 3rd chapter'

I am sorry I saw Diwakar sleeping in class and decided to do some social service by keeping him awake with an exciting game of Hollywood ergo not listening to a word of what was said in class thereby ensuring that both of us missed out on atleast 3 questions.
I am sorry Priya and I avoided studying all night with lame promises of getting up 'really early' in the morning.
I am even sorrier that we didn't open the pretty green book and took the shortcut thanks to Microsoft powerpoint.

I am happy I could atleast pretend to write answers for 25 out of 30 questions.
I am happy that the faces around me had the same expression as me.

Ah. The element of surprise.

XLing in everything

I miss…

• Amma’s shoulder in the night
• Lazing around on the brown couch with dish tv
• Fighting with Appa to watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S despite seeing that episode a million times
• Playing every game in Amoeba with S
• Vathakuzhambu and Keera mulagootal
• Signing into google talk and connecting
• Blossom browsing trips with Teletubby and Medusa
• Waking up in the night without realising your t-shirt is soaked in sweat
• Arguing with Pras about everything from deployments to food.
• My Saturday night dinner outings with Amma and Appa
• Discussing arbit facebook gossip with Kiks
• Conversations about everything under the sun with D
• My balcony when the rains arrive
• Bangalore
• You-tube-ing random rubbish with Nav.
• My Blanket, book shelf & bean bag

I’ve learnt to…

• Share a bathroom with 16 other girls
• Loosen up a little and enjoy everything around me
• Make my own bed
• Operate a washing machine
• Eat chapathi for two meals in a day
• Live without internet access 24 hours of the day
• Sleep for 3 hours and still function normally the next day
• Not suffer Ver Se withdrawal symptoms
• Manage Dhobi and Maid schedules

I love…

• The pampering I get from everyone because I am away from home
• Our girl talk sessions in the room at 1 in the morning
• The dosa guy who stands right outside the building
• Waking up hoping for rain every single day
• Random conversations with S at 2 30 in the morning
• The blast of air conditioner when I walk into the class from the heat
• Having a power nap and waking up all refreshed
• Going to the mailing office and seeing Amma’s handwriting on the courier
• Astha adjusting my fan right after I lie down such that I don’t feel hot
• Being singled out in class for being a psychology student
• How project discussions suddenly turn into pictionary games
• The Nimboo Paani at Dadus.
  

Looking ahead. Behind. All at the same time.

Back to the stars!

I finally went to the planetarium again yesterday. I last visited the planetarium when I was 12 and was just as excited about going in as I was that day!
S and I walked around and read all those charts like good children and then I insisted we take a print-out of our weights in different planets which S vehemently refused. Then we waited in a long line till we could go in to the auditorium. I was expecting a dank, dingy place but the auditorium took me by surprise. It looked quite comfortable and state of the art.
We settled in our seats and complained for a few minutes about the army of noisy kids who sat next to us but when the lights went off and the starry sky was seen, we were stunned into silence.

I cannot even describe how absolutely brilliant it was to just lie back and see that sky. The show we saw was titled 'Celestial Fireworks' so we got to see shooting stars, meteors and asteroids. I must admit, I stopped paying attention to the commentary after a while and was too lost in the beauty of the sky. I sheepishly admitted this fact to S after the show only to find out he had done the same himself.

For that 30 minutes, we both were just a couple of 10 year olds again, fervently whispering 'Look at that' and 'That was awesome!'

Go find the closest planetarium today.